RelBOSS: A Relationship-Aware Access Control Framework for Software Services

Context-awareness

is an important aspect of the

dynamically changing environments

and the

relationship context information

brings new benefits to the access control systems. Existing relationship-aware access control approaches are highly domain-specific and consider the expression of access control policies in terms of the relationship context information. However, these approaches are unable to dynamically capture the granularity levels and strengths of the relevant relationship. To this end, in this paper we present a formal

Relationship-Aware Access Control (RAAC)

model for specifying the relevant

relationship context information

and the corresponding

access control policies

. Using the

RAAC

model, we introduce an ontology-based framework,

Rel

ationship-

B

ased access control

O

ntology for

S

oftware

S

ervices

(

RelBOSS

). One of the main novelties of the framework is that it dynamically captures the

relationship context information

(the

type/name

,

granularity levels

and

strengths

of the relevant relationship). Experiments with a software prototype confirm the feasibility of our framework.